Data provided by vultures is helping the Israeli army locate bodies or mass graves near the sites of the October 7 attack by Palestinian Hamas militants, AFP learned from a program manager.
The idea came from the EITAN unit, belonging to the Human Resources branch of the Israeli army, responsible for searching for missing soldiers.
“When the war started, I was approached by reservists serving in this unit. They asked me if my birds could help with anything,” Ohad Hatzofe, director of the bird program, told AFP. endangered to the Israel Nature and Parks Authority.
Vultures are scavenger birds of prey with a very wide field of vision allowing them to detect corpses from the sky which constitute the bulk of their food. There are many species around the world, but in Israel, the griffon vulture is endangered.
The program follows several hundred of these raptors equipped with GPS tags to understand their migratory trajectories, study their feeding behavior and the threats weighing on these protected species.
On October 23, a rare large sea eagle which had just returned to Israeli skies after spending the summer in northern Russia found itself near Beeri, one of the kibbutzim heavily attacked by Hamas commandos. And the next day, an extended station in an area near the village alerts the scientist.
“I sent my data (to the army). They went to check and they found four bodies,” explains Mr. Hatzofe, who cannot say more about the location and identity of these bodies.
The use of data from a second bird, a Bonelli’s eagle, made it possible to find “other bodies inside Israel”, explained Ohad Hatzofe.
Several hundred bodies of the “disappeared” have not yet been found or identified.
“It helps to find our missing loved ones,” comments the program manager. A month after the attack, the chances of finding “human remains” have become “minimal”, he adds.
At least 1,400 people died on the Israeli side, according to the authorities, the majority civilians killed on the same day of the unprecedented attack perpetrated by the Islamist movement Hamas, which also kidnapped around 240 hostages according to Israel.
Police said Monday they had identified the bodies of 843 civilians and 351 soldiers.
According to the Hamas government’s Ministry of Health, the war has left more than 10,500 dead in the Gaza Strip, the majority civilians.
published on November 9 at 4:22 p.m., AFP